BIRDS OF PASSAGE
Dropping round and clear across the still miles,
Ringing down the midnight's marble stair,
A bird's cry is falling through the darkness,
Falling from the fields of upper air.
Through the rainy fragrance of the April night
Slow it falls, circling in the fall,
And all the sheeted lake of sleeping silences
Is troubled by the solitary call.
Each human heart awake knows the loneliness
Of that strange voice clear and far,
That lost voice searching through the midnight,
That lonely star calling to a star.
Old memories are thronging through the darkness...
Slow tears are blinding sleepless eyes...
O lonely hearts remembering in the midnight!
O dark and empty skies!
WASTE
Reluctant, groping fog crept gray and cold
Up from the fields where now the guns were still;
Far off the thundering surge of battle rolled
And darkness brooded on the quiet hill;
Clearly, across the listening night, the shrill
And rhythmic cry of a lonely cricket fell
On ears long deafened by the scream of shot and shell.
And there were two who listened wistfully
To that glad voice, that sad last voice of all,
Who on the morrow after reveille
Would make no answer to the muster call;
Others would eat their mess, others would fall
When the lines formed again into their places,
And soon their marching comrades would forget their faces.
One moaned a little and the other turned
Painfully sidewise, peering up the bare
Shell-furrowed slope. Then, while his deep wound burned,
He crawled, slow inch by weary inch, to where
The boy lay,—young, he thought, and strangely fair.
"You see, I came," he said. "It was a wrench.
I thought I'd die. Let's have a light here. What! You're French!